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Why should she be surprised by that? Why should she feel threatened by that acknowledgement? Nik was devastatingly good-looking...sexy, very sexy. He couldn’t help being like that. She had watched him at dinner parties, the effortless cynosure of all female attention. He took it for granted. It had always been that way for Nik, she imagined. His mother and sisters probably worshipped the ground he walked on too. So really it was only natural that she should also be aware of that natural magnetism, should find momentarily that the ground lurched almost dizzily beneath her on receipt of one dazzling smile... Yes, it was only natural wasn’t it? It didn’t mean anything, just that she was female and alive.
‘I’m glad that you are feeling stronger but you look very serious,’ Nik drawled.
Leah took a deep breath. As she glanced up, she caught the dancing remnants of humour in his clear gaze and her mouth ran dry. Nik in charm mode—well, that was a new one to her, wasn’t it? Deliberately she fixed her gaze to one side of him. ‘We need to talk.’
Nik laughed softly. ‘The hour is too late, pethi mou.’
Her husband, the chauvinist pig. Any minute now he’d be telling her not to worry her pretty little head about anything. Nik, she appreciated with a stab of pain, had never taken her seriously. Maybe he never took any woman seriously or maybe it was because she was small and blonde and once she had been crazy about him and he knew it.
But five years ago Nik had put her on ice. He had left her to exist in limbo, neither free nor married. And in that interim it had not occurred to him that her feelings might have changed. He had not been interested in her feelings. He had been far too bound up in seething resentment and bitterness even to spare a thought for what she might be suffering.
It had not occurred to him that she might turn to another man. It had not occurred to him that she might be willing to sacrifice the financially privileged lifestyle that being an Andreakis gave her to gain her freedom. Nik had falsely assumed that the money and the status were very important to her. And those were the barriers she had to breach.
‘Nik, we have to talk, and, if it’s possible, without you getting angry, threatening or sarcastic,’ Leah murmured tightly.
Nik was lounging back against the edge of his desk, surveying her with an air of maddening indulgence, the same way that one might look at a child struggling to be amusingly mature beyond its years. And yet she could sense tension within him on another level.
‘Nik—’
‘Your meal.’ At spectacular speed, Nik strode across the room and whipped a tray from a dumbstruck manservant.
Leah was equally astonished. Had it been anyone else but Nik, who had all the sensitivity of a battering-ram, she would have thought he was being deliberately evasive.
‘Eat.’ The tray was placed on her lap.
‘Nik, I know about you and Eleni Kiriakos.’
He swung back to her, a frown-line pleating his winged ebony brows. ‘Ponia,’ he guessed grimly. ‘What do you know?’
‘I understand that you were engaged to her.’
‘For years,’ Nik conceded with disorientating casualness.
Leah looked at her exquisitely arranged salad with sinking appetite and lifted the cutlery. ‘Well, I can understand how you must have felt when Max put you in a position where you had to break that engagement and lose the woman you loved.’
‘The timing was inconvenient...’
Leah lifted her head. ‘Inconvenient?’ she echoed half an octave higher.
Nik released his breath with impatience. ‘I have known Eleni all my life. We were betrothed in our teens. The decision had nothing to do with us. It was what our fathers wanted, a merger between two shipping lines. Eleni wanted to be a doctor. Her father did not approve but my support brought him round. Both Eleni and I knew that eventually we would have to disappoint our families but in the interim it suited both of us to play along—’
‘Play along?’ Leah questioned.
‘If I had said that I did not wish to marry Eleni her father would have pressured her to marry someone else and she might never have got to study medicine,’ Nik explained, his mouth twisting. ‘You must understand that Eleni is a dedicated doctor who gives virtually one hundred per cent to her vocation. She has time for little else. She is not the wife I would have chosen for myself, nor was I the husband she would have chosen...’
Leah swallowed hard, striving to absorb his calm assurance and tie it in with what she had believed she had seen in that hospital. Close friends embracing? Eleni had been so affectionate towards Nik but then people who had known each other all their lives tended to be and possibly it had been some time since they had last met, Leah reasoned uncertainly under the onslaught of Nik’s level scrutiny. His cool candour was impressive, she had to admit.
‘You weren’t in love with her?’
‘I believed I was once.’ Nik smiled with wry recall. ‘But I was only eighteen. Eleni was beautiful. That was all that mattered. But it was not very long before her absorption in her studies made me see that we were incompatible.’
‘You wanted her one hundred per cent vocation to be targeted on you.’
‘You know me so well.’
‘Frankly, it was just an observation,’ Leah said stiffly. ‘Why did you call the timing of our marriage inconvenient?’
‘Eleni’s father blamed my defection on her dedication to her career and she was forced into open conflict with her family before she had won her independence.’
‘And how did your family react?’ Leah heard herself prompt tautly.
‘With shock, horror and shame at my behaviour,’ Nik enumerated flatly. ‘A betrothal is a serious commitment in Greek society, most particularly to a family as steeped in traditional beliefs as mine. I was accused of dishonouring the Andreakis name. It is true that inevitably the betrothal would have been broken but the fact that I immediately married someone else magnified the offence in their eyes.’
Leah studied the carpet and she saw her father like a cold force at the centre of a storm, wielding the elements within his grasp without caring about the damage he inflicted. ‘I’m sorry,’ she sighed.
‘It’s immaterial now. Last year Eleni married another doctor.’ Nik’s strong features tautened. ‘Both families were placated by that development. If they do not concede that we had a right to choose our own partners, I do believe they both acknowledge that Eleni and I would not have been suited.’
Leah began picking at her salad, a little embarrassed at her dramatic assumption that Eleni Kiriakos was Nik’s mistress. A newly married woman, a lifelong friend. Why should she not have openly demonstrated her fondness for Nik? Perhaps she had misinterpreted what she saw because she had never been in a position to offer anyone that kind of affection. Her father hadn’t wanted it. Nik hadn’t wanted it. By the time Paul came along, she had been inhibited by the habit of concealing her emotions.
The silence lingered. Deep in thought, Leah ate her meal.
‘You close me out as if I’m invisible,’ Nik murmured silkily. ‘When you do that I want to smash things and shout.’
Her silvery head flew up, stark confusion etched in her sapphire eyes. ‘That’s childish.’
Nik shrugged a broad shoulder with magnificent unconcern. ‘There is a child inside every one of us.’
Leah cleared her throat awkwardly, strangely disconcerted by that unexpected admission and the ease with which he’d made it. Living with Nik, she decided, was like camping out on the side of a live volcano. There was always a rumble, a warning quake of suggested disaster in the air.
‘Why won’t you let me go?’ she demanded starkly.
‘You’re my wife.’
‘Not good enough.’
Nik spread beautifully shaped fingers. ‘That certificate is still out there,’ he reminded her drily.
Leah paled. ‘But my father is dead...he probably destroyed it!’
